Managing I/O Interference in a Shared Burst Buffer System

In this work, we investigate the problem of inter-application interference in a shared Burst Buffer (BB) system. A BB is a new storage technology for HPC architectures that acts as an intermediate layer between performance-hungry HPC applications and the slow parallel file system. While the BB is meant to alleviate the problem of slow I/O in HPC systems, it is itself prone to performance degradation under interference. We observe that the magnitude of interference effects can reach a level that matters to the HPC system and the jobs that run on it. We investigate I/O scheduling techniques as a mechanism to mitigate BB I/O interference. With our results, we show that scheduling techniques tuned to BBs can control interference and significant performance benefits can be achieved.